Firefox Relay Now Lets You Generate Throwaway Phone Numbers
Firefox Relay is a service that lets you generate burner emails to use to sign up for things while hiding your email from spammers and such, similar to what Apple offers with its Hide My Email feature. Now, the browser is offering the same capabilities for phone numbers, letting you generate throwaway numbers and keeping your actual number away from parties you might not feel comfortable sharing with.
How it works is that when you sign up for the number masking service, you will be prompted to verify your real phone number. After that, you will have to choose a phone number mask to use, which you can use to give out in any situation you see fit. You can only get one phone number and, as of now, you cannot change the number, although Firefox says it's working on this option.
When somebody tries to contact you through the generated number, the call or SMS will be forwarded to your true number, making it both practical and privacy-focused. You can even respond to the forwarded texts in case you need to verify something, but you can't make outbound calls without revealing your real number just yet — according to the company, this is also in development.
Every month, each account will have a limit of up to 50 minutes for incoming calls and 75 text messages. If a user receives too many spam calls or texts to their phone, they can go to the Relay dashboard and choose to either block the individual spam numbers or just turn off the forwarding for their number mask.
Unfortunately, while Firefox Relay has a free tier for its email masking service, the phone number masking service is exclusively a paid feature that costs up to four times as much. The phone protection plan costs US$4.99 a month and includes email masking, but only US$3.99 per month if you choose to pay a lump sum for a whole year.
Relay's phone number masking is only available in the US and Canada for now, but Firefox says it's exploring on launching it in other regions in the future.
Firefox Relay now has a new service for phone number masking.
Exclusively a paid feature, it gives you a number mask to hide your real number when signing up for things.
It is currently only available in the US and Canada, priced at US$4.99 per month.